Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class

Benjamin Goldman, Jamie Gracie and Sonya Porter

No 35140, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Americans rarely marry outside their race or class group, a pattern with well-documented implications for inequality and intergenerational mobility. Limited exposure—or interactions with members of other groups—may partly explain these low intergroup marriage rates. We instrument for exposure using variation in childhood neighborhoods based on whether other race and class groups had more opposite-sex children of similar age. Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent-income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (White and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage market model predicts that residential segregation—one of many forms of exposure—accounts for more than one third of marital sorting by class but less than 5% by race.

JEL-codes: D31 J12 J15 J62 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
Note: CH PE
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